Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of the genetics mail-order testing firm 23andMe, grew up in one version of Silicon Valley royalty, according to a profile this weekend by the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd.

Wojcicki’s father, Stanley Wojcicki, is an emeritus professor and former chair of Stanford University’s physics department. Her mother, Esther, is a UC Berkeley graduate and English and journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School, where her former student James Franco made a video tribute to her.

Co-founder and CEO of 23andMe Anne Wojcicki. (Dai Sugano/Staff)

It’s the sort of family, Wojcicki joked, where “you’re only a viable fetus once you have your Ph.D.”

Given that kind of intellectual pedigree, it may come as no surprise that the man Wojcicki dated after her breakup from Google co-founder Sergey Brin would have some trouble fitting into the Wojcicki clan.

That guy is former Major League Baseball great Alex Rodriguez.

Wojcicki, 44, and Rodriguez dated for about a year and a half before splitting in late 2016.

Wojcicki, a former Wall Street biotech analyst, admitted to Dowd that Rodriguez’ athletic stardom was probably one reason she was attracted to him — even though she had never attended a professional baseball game in her life.

Rodriguez, after all, was a strapping man who “represented every woman’s dream of how you one-up an ex, especially a Silicon Valley nerd,” Dowd wrote.

Wojcicki also admitted: “My mom was like, ‘What’s an A-Rod?’ I was like, ‘Mom, that’s his name.’”

Wojcicki said their cross-cultural romance consisted of her installing TV sets in her Los Altos home so that the former New York Yankees player could watch his favorite game.

While she describes A-Rod as a “sweet” and “smart” guy, she said that different coasts and parenting obligations pulled them apart.

But her mother has a different take, and she differs with her daughter’s assessment that A-Rod was such a “smart” guy — or smart in a way that she and the Wojcicki family could relate to.

“He seemed to be genuinely in love with Anne,” Esther Wojcicki told the Times. “But I right away figured out this was a mismatch. He had no academic background. We couldn’t have an intellectual conversation about anything. His main interest in life was something that none of us had ever focused on, which was baseball.”

The mother also claimed that Rodriguez often spent long periods of time parked in front of those TVs installed in her daughter’s home.

“He could … watch baseball for 10 hours a day,” she said. “He wasn’t even sure he wanted to go on the yacht with Anne because the TV might not be working.”

While Esther Wojcicki agreed that A-Rod is “a very nice man,” she also said his high level of fame meant that they couldn’t go anywhere in public with him, not unless they wanted to be mobbed by fans wanting selfies.

She said: “If we went to Target to look for clothes for the kids, all of a sudden we’d be looking around and people would be saying, ‘We just want a selfie with A-Rod.’ He can’t walk across Central Park. He has to take a cab.”

Esther Wojcicki assumes that this kind of intense scrutiny isn’t too much for Jennifer Lopez, A-Rod’s current girlfriend. Lopez, of course, is used to handling that level of fame and probably even likes the attention, Esther Wojcicki assumes.

“That will work better with [his current girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez] because she’s like, ‘Take a picture of me anytime.’ … I wish J. Lo all the luck in the world.”

Martha Ross is a features writer who covers everything and anything related to popular culture, society, health, women’s issues and families. A native of the East Bay and a graduate of Northwestern University and Mills College, she’s also a former hard-news and investigative reporter, covering crime and local politics.

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